-PVE- Discipline rotation

Hi guys,

I've been playing priest since the launch of MoP and I really enjoy healing with the class. But I only played as a holy priest the entire expansion, I tried discipline 2x already and it didn't feel the same as holy. But now, I really want to play as a discipline but i'm lacking some information!
My character is Anthix (EU)- Twisting Nether (itemlevel 489-491). I currently stacked a lot of haste (2nd cap), cause I tend to switch to shadow where with some item swaps I have my haste capped for that spec. Now I have two question regarding the discipline spec!

* Basically my first question is, which rotation should I use while healing as discipline? With holy I got it all balanced which spell to use in which situation, but as discipline I'am lost. It's mainly the rotation that made me respecc to holy each time. If someone could provide me a rotation to maintain in raids? Every piece of advice is appreciated!

What I currently do:
I use spirit shell whenever I can, depending on the situation and use a rapture addon to track it's CD. But should I use shields more often, than just using it every 12 sec? Should I avoid using certain spells (renew, greater healer, flash heal, PoM,...) as a discipline? I'm so used of playing as a holy priest I sometimes search for CoH while in disc spec . I feel lost when I can't do SS or heal a entire group with PoH. I want to maximally use all my spells and aspects of the specc, instead of just PoH+SS when off CD!

* For my second question, I currently stacked a lot of haste and with a reforge here and there I can get around 8K mastery. Should I totally neglect haste, crit and even lower my spirit for more mastery?

Thanks for reading guys,
hopefully I can enjoy playing discipline with your advice !

Should I avoid using certain spells (renew, greater healer, flash heal, PoM,...) as a discipline?

Don't everever ever use renew, the only time you can use renew as disc is while running and you can't put a shield and have already used your penance / pom / instant holy fire / cascade // divine star, which means realistically never.

most of the time in 10 man you'll be smiting, the 40yards range and the intelligent healing mechanic + the bonus of added dps make it a go to "heal". Lay off the flash heal if you can, greater has it's use but no more than a few times per fight, binding heal can be used too but exactly in the same manner, sparingly. Cascade is very good. Don't abuse Shields out of rapture cooldown unless you're on a low mana demanding or extremely heavy damage fight.
ANY fight that has a bonus damage mechanic somewhere means you should abuse smite (stone guards, elegon, garalon, meljarak, unsok).
Always have 5 stacks of evangelism ready to pop archangel for big hitting phases and/or stacking spirit shell.
In low healing phases don't pop archangel and keep smiting/atoned penance for the reduced mana cost of those spells.

Discs stacking mastery is effective in 25man because of not being able to cap spirit shell, in 10man it's near useless as you'll be capping spirit shell with 2 casts of poh (get an addon to see your spirit shell cap, I use VuhDo) I would suggest going crit as it doesn't hurt your mana like haste does and benefits all your spells contrary to mastery.

ps: I suppose your haste cap is for renew? get rid of it you're nerfing yourself by using renew, and even more so by reforging around a renew cap.

Don't everever ever use renew, the only time you can use renew as disc is while running and you can't put a shield and have already used your penance / pom / instant holy fire / cascade // divine star, which means realistically never.

most of the time in 10 man you'll be smiting, the 40yards range and the intelligent healing mechanic + the bonus of added dps make it a go to "heal". Lay off the flash heal if you can, greater has it's use but no more than a few times per fight, binding heal can be used too but exactly in the same manner, sparingly. Cascade is very good. Don't abuse Shields out of rapture cooldown unless you're on a low mana demanding or extremely heavy damage fight.
ANY fight that has a bonus damage mechanic somewhere means you should abuse smite (stone guards, elegon, garalon, meljarak, unsok).
Always have 5 stacks of evangelism ready to pop archangel for big hitting phases and/or stacking spirit shell.
In low healing phases don't pop archangel and keep smiting/atoned penance for the reduced mana cost of those spells.

Discs stacking mastery is effective in 25man because of not being able to cap spirit shell, in 10man it's near useless as you'll be capping spirit shell with 2 casts of poh (get an addon to see your spirit shell cap, I use VuhDo) I would suggest going crit as it doesn't hurt your mana like haste does and benefits all your spells contrary to mastery.

ps: I suppose your haste cap is for renew? get rid of it you're nerfing yourself by using renew, and even more so by reforging around a renew cap.

Thanks for the reply! Appreciated! Is there any need for the 4-set bonus actually?

Thanks for the reply! Appreciated! Is there any need for the 4-set bonus actually?

No problem, my pleasure. Some priests don't like it but I don't really understand them, penance is an incredible spell to have on a 6 second cooldown, it hits hard and heals well through atonement, heals even better if used as pure heal as well as granting your 3xgrace stacks easily to that target, can be cast while running, and is dirt cheap when you maintain your 5 stacks of evangelism through the fight.
But of course if you don't find yourself using it that often don't bother taking the bonus. I just know I use it on cooldown.

No problem, my pleasure. Some priests don't like it but I don't really understand them, penance is an incredible spell to have on a 6 second cooldown, it hits hard and heals well through atonement, heals even better if used as pure heal as well as granting your 3xgrace stacks easily to that target, can be cast while running, and is dirt cheap when you maintain your 5 stacks of evangelism through the fight.
But of course if you don't find yourself using it that often don't bother taking the bonus. I just know I use it on cooldown.

Penance, while good, is an HPS loss compared to Prayer of Healing. If you're going for maximum output, the spell isn't useful for much beyond stacking Evangelism. And the ten second cooldown is fine for that, especially if you glyph instant Holy Fire and also squeeze those in while moving.

If mana management and triage mattered more this tier, the set bonus would be a lot better. I think the set bonus is still worth picking up if you can get it easily, though.

It's not about whether or not it's an HPS loss compared to PoH, Atonement healing isn't going to compare to regular healing (HPS-wise) outside of damage gimmick fights. The difference is that you can use Atonement healing as your fallback, and then PoH, PoM, Cascade and such when it's raid-healing time and you need max HPS. Penance should be used on cooldown for Atonement healing, however, so for Disc Priests that use Atonement heavily (You know, the ones with a clue), the set bonus is good, though perhaps not essential if you have stronger off-set gear.

While Atonement HPS may not be the max you can squeeze out of your character, remember that your DPS, while obviously not the same as a full-fledged DPS spec, -does- contribute to getting the boss down faster. There are other factors to being a healer than simply looking at the Healing Done meters. The 5% (In a 10man) damage you did to the boss may end up being the difference between a barely-controlled kill and a wipe. Sure, you might not ride high on either meter (Though Atonement healing is by no means bad), but killing the boss is what should matter. There are other healers who do not have as good an option to heal while DPSing, leave them to focus on healing spells full-time while you contribute more overall. This should not be taken to mean that you should prioritise Atonement over healing spells when healing is needed, though. But 80% of the time in the current tier, you can Atonement heal comfortably.

So many people are hung up on HPS these days, especially disc priest - hogging meter with PoH spam for SS/DA even when direct single target healing is much needed in certain situation. I've failed many disc priests trials in our guild this tier because they don't understand the importance of emergency single target healing. You can look good with POH or other aoe spell spamming and let someone die, or you can actually throw in single target healing and keep someone alive. (This applies to any healing class)

Flash Heal and Penance are the only two spells that make sense when quick single target spot healing is needed. The fact that Penance is down to 6 seconds CD (less with smite) with 4pc makes spot healing so much better and easier.

On topic:

There's only one rotation really for disc priest and it's for deep, single-target healing when someone is at incredibly low health and is about to take more hits: PW:S -> Penance 3 ticks > Gheal.

Otherwise, you choose your spells in accordance with the situation you're presented.
Spells to use for single target healing: Gheal (best with borrowed time buff)/Penance/Flash Heal (if necessary)/PW:S for rapture or emergency buffer on someone with low health if you know there will be more damage coming before you can heal him up high enough to avoid death.
Spells to use when 3+ people in a group that needs healing and the group isn't spread: PoH
PoM should be used off CD when there's constant raid pulsing damage. Otherwise you can choose to cast it off CD on tank or have an addon to track whenever it expires or its charges run out.
SS can be used with PoH ahead of time to prevent raid wide damage or with Gheal on tank or players with specific debuff for strong single target absorption.
Inner Focus should be used whenever it's available (the mana saving and strong DA is good enough to offset the situation when crit overheals)
Binding Heal is also good for some very niche situation in which someone in the group needs immediate single target attention and you also require healing as well.

So because he never said it it can't be part of the explanation for why some people don't like the set bonus? Logic fail.

Hey, remember how this is a discussion and not a schoolyard where it's about looking cool? How about we try to act like that?

The assumption I got from your post was simply that you viewed Penance as a waste of time because it isn't the max possible HPS you can put out. That's true, which I also said, but you won't be spamming PoH all the time just because it's your highest HPS spell, because a Disc Priest can contribute in much better ways than 100% PoH spam.

Agree with that, but was looking for some pointers/tips to get me started as discipline. Played as discipline last night, managed to two-heal a PUG on first boss ToES (elite mode) and even came out on top. Starting to get the hang of it.

But as I asked before, I'am currently sitting around 6.300 mastery, is there a soft cap somewhere? Reading about haste/crit gemming, but I looked at the profiles of discipline priests in top guilds and one stacked mastery around 7K and than started to reforge for crit? Is that a way to go?

Hey, remember how this is a discussion and not a schoolyard where it's about looking cool? How about we try to act like that?

The assumption I got from your post was simply that you viewed Penance as a waste of time because it isn't the max possible HPS you can put out. That's true, which I also said, but you won't be spamming PoH all the time just because it's your highest HPS spell, because a Disc Priest can contribute in much better ways than 100% PoH spam.

If you're going for maximum HPS, a ten second cooldown is about as good as a six second cooldown for Penance because its main use is stacking Evangelism. That doesn't mean that Penance is a "waste of time" or that I'm advocating "100% PoH spam," and obviously has no bearing at all on the set bonus's value when you aren't going for maximum HPS.

If you're going for maximum HPS, a ten second cooldown is about as good as a six second cooldown for Penance because its main use is stacking Evangelism. That doesn't mean that Penance is a "waste of time" or that I'm advocating "100% PoH spam," and obviously has no bearing at all on the set bonus's value when you aren't going for maximum HPS.

Yeah. Maybe. In 25man. In 10man if your gameplay is centred around spamming poh, you're either incredibly lazy, or just not that good. Efficiency doesn't mean less hps.

If you're using atonement healing when nothing more is required you're efficient and spendaing about half as much mana as some random guy mashing his poh, if you're poh spamming when there's little to no damage, you're not gaining anything from the poh spamming and you're losing raid dps and especially mana. If you're gemming to be able to spam a spell that isn't necessary you're losing hps because you're not gemming for throughput you're gemming for regen. All pretty basic stuff.

You can check out my logs, There are not a lot of fights where I'm not at the very least over the 75th percentile and more often than not nicely at or over the 95th percentile, and that is certainly not by mashing poh and simply using smite/penance to maintain evangelism stacks.
Now granted this is not an epeen battle, I'm simply trying to make the point that even if you don't find this gameplay appropriate for 25man raiding, for 10man it is more than effective and usually the best way to provide maximum hps while at the time providing an extra 50kdps which tends to help quite a bit on progress fights, especially when 2 healing. shorter fights = less need for regen again.

I'm sitting at 7k spirit, fully gemmed int and reforged to crit. And penance is my main nuke when spamming atonement, and a 6sec cooldown on it is the only way to get 3xgrace stacks on both tanks for spirit shell, unless you enjoy casting single target while spirit shelling which I doubt highly.

You can say what you like about 25man, poh spamming and spirit stacking, but in 10man you're wasting a lot of potential if you're simply building your game around mashing poh and gemming to be able to just go on ad vitam æternam spamming your button. Then again, this is just my advice.

I'm sitting at 7k spirit, fully gemmed int and reforged to crit. And penance is my main nuke when spamming atonement, and a 6sec cooldown on it is the only way to get 3xgrace stacks on both tanks for spirit shell, unless you enjoy casting single target while spirit shelling which I doubt highly.

So u would recommend me going into full int/crit? What do u do during battles, u constantly spam smite and SS when needed or is there more complexity to it?

So u would recommend me going into full int/crit? What do u do during battles, u constantly spam smite and SS when needed or is there more complexity to it?

Nah, certainly not if you're not used to the spec. Spirit levels vary from healer to healer, it depends on what you feel happy with, which in turn depends on your raids capacity to not stand in the bad stuff, on your tanks ability to take low damage, on the amount of regen CD available in your raid, etc, etc.
I've got a good raid comp and play with players who I've been playing with for a while so we all know how to complement each other.

I'd suggest aiming for something along the lines of 10k spirit (don't use a flask to reach that if you haven't got it yet, spirit flasks are a total waste of time, same for food buff. Always use int flask & food [spirit is only worth while if it's a 2 to 1 tradeoff VS intell]), and remove whatever you feel at ease with.
I've gemmed full int because I'm often smiting, yes, but also because spirit gems don't provide hps, intell does, as long as you're not having mana problems of course.
I play a lot with atonement yes, but disc is mostly about using your rapture procs on CD, and using poh intelligently, what spells you use to fill in are more or less a preference thing, I use a lot of pom, cascade, binding and greater heal when needed, and most importantly using all your CDs corrrectly (Void shift on a low health tank with desperate prayer and a healthstone and you've basically got a "lay on hands" of your own).

The only thing I'll say about gemming int is that it will always be a net hps gain over gemming spirit, as long as you can manage your mana. If you feel you've got problems with mana, don't mess about with int gems, if you don't, go crazy.

I'm sitting at 7k spirit, fully gemmed int and reforged to crit. And penance is my main nuke when spamming atonement, and a 6sec cooldown on it is the only way to get 3xgrace stacks on both tanks for spirit shell, unless you enjoy casting single target while spirit shelling which I doubt highly.

I don't know if I'm reading this incorrectly but by saying Penance is your main nuke are you meaning for damage and Atonement healing or just straight up healing? Because if it's damage then you don't stack Grace via Atonement.

I presume you mean just straight up healing of course; just the wording confuses me.

I don't know if I'm reading this incorrectly but by saying Penance is your main nuke are you meaning for damage and Atonement healing or just straight up healing? Because if it's damage then you don't stack Grace via Atonement.

I presume you mean just straight up healing of course; just the wording confuses me.

By nuke I mean it's the hardest hitting dps spell, it is the go-to spell for atonement healing. I was talking about the grace stacking only before spirit shell, or some hard hitting phase, just a little bonus you know, not as a main mechanic of disc healing. Otherwise, yeah, atonement all the way, pom, cascade, pw:shield, and poh if needed as fillers.